1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to transmitting data across integrated circuit chip structures and more particularly to a novel structure and method for transmitting data across integrated circuit chip structures that substantially increases the utilization of existing data transmission lines by simultaneously transmitting (e.g., pipelining) different data portions along different segments of a single data transmission line.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the size of devices within integrated circuit chips decreases and the clock speed increases, the ability to transmit data from one portion of the chip to another portion becomes increasingly difficult. In essence, because the device sizes are decreasing and the clock speed is increasing, the data transmission lines are actually becoming relatively longer even if they actually stay the same size because their environment continues to decrease our around them. In other words, a previous data transmission line might have spanned 10,000 devices while the same size data transmission line may now span 100,000 devices.
Some chips utilize buffers to repower the signal as data is transmitted across the chip; however, at some point, as the number of buffers is increased, the time required to transmit a signal decreases unacceptably. Therefore, rebuffering transmitted signals reaches a point of diminishing returns and, in some situations, cannot accommodate for decreases in device size and clock speed increases.
The integrated circuit designer must balance clock trees so as to allow for the maximum time for data transmissions across the chip. Whatever skew exists must ultimately come out of the clock cycle time, which slows down the clock. In addition, the power consumed by clock trees is a significant part of the overall power consumption of the chip. The invention described below addresses these issues by presenting a novel structure and method for transmitting data across integrated circuit chip structures that substantially increases the utilization of existing data transmission lines by simultaneously transmitting different data portions along different segments of a single data transmission line.